First as a teenager and then as a young man in the years before he won the Yale Younger Poets Award for his first book, A Mask for Janus, W.S. Merwin here remembers his early, summer-like glimpses of a timeless way of life rapidly fading. At 16, Merwin gained entrance to Princeton, where he befriended Jean Prévost's son Alain, which led to summers with the Stuyvesant family as a tutor at Deer Park in New Jersey and in St. Jean Cap-Ferrat, near Nice. In 1948, when Merwin was 21, graduated, and married, he returned to Europe, when such travel was "still surrounded with an atmosphere of adventure and improvisation, and my youth and inexperience and my all but complete lack of money heightened that vertiginous sensation." The author of many volumes of prose and poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection The Carrier of Ladders, W.S. Merwin is considered one of the finest living poets in English, while also translating poets from other languages and times. Much of his inspiration has come from living in New York, France, Mexico, and Hawaii, his current home.